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ClimateGate — “covered” but not exposed in The Australian

Hackers Expose Climate Brawl Monday Nov 23, 2009

UPDATE Mon 23rd: The Australian put this story on Page 1, and added an image file of “quotes” for which they deserve kudos. This blog comments on the online version. The in-print version is better (see at the bottom).

Caroline Overington writes up the story of the hackers breaking in to the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU), but misses the meat of the story. The Australian can tick the box “Covered”, but not tick the box “Incisive”.

She includes a few of the emails, but misses the bombshells while wasting column space discussing irrelevancies. As the Australian Senators sit down to assess the meaningfulness of an Emissions Trading Scheme this week, we can only hope they have better sources of information.

The extraordinary emails from the East Anglia CRU expose how corrupt climate science has become. They are nothing less than startling. Leading researchers have been caught discussing how to “hide the decline”, how to refuse their scientific and legal obligations, and threatening to blackball professional journals to stop legitimate research being published. These same researchers have a long persistent record of hiding data and when faced with a series of legal requests, have claimed they’ve “lost” the entire original global set of climate records. The whole set. Really?

She writes that the climate scientists say they have been taken out of context. But she doesn’t tell us that they’ve been caught saying “delete those files” in the context of an FOI request.

These points are the ones that every voting Australian should know, they expose the IPCC claims of transparent “expert” review for what they are, brazen, baseless PR. Phil Jones’ embarrassing emails are being quoted all over the web, and Overington manages to find all the ones showing the East Anglia boys are petty, cheering over the death of a skeptic, but not the ones showing that they repeatedly hide awkward results, adjust data, and do their utmost to distort the normal scientific process. It’s no big news that a scientist might be caught being bad mannered. It’s unprofessional, but hardly shakes the very core of science, which is what some of the other emails do. Emails that go unmentioned.

She writes that the climate scientists say that they have been taken out of context. But she doesn’t tell us that they’ve been caught saying “delete those files” in the context of an FOI request.

And it’s not like there was just one moment of “hiding data”. It’s a repeated thread and a constant fear for Phil Jones:

“Don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites… (skeptics) have been after the data for years…. I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

“You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also…”

“PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!”

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith
will do likewise.  Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new
email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA
claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!”

Phil Jones is a lead author of several IPCC reports. Does the headline “Lead IPCC Author Caught Altering Data” not have some appeal?

“Eminent” researchers discuss techniques that might allow them to reject the reasonable requests for public data at their public institution. They talk about hiding behind the data protection act, about someone hiding behind their “retirement”, and they fish for possible “confidentiality agreements” as a way of getting out of meeting their scientific and legal obligations.

The closest Overington comes to hitting a target that matters is with the Trenberth quote:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Dr Trenberth says data published last August “shows there should be even more warming . . . the data are surely wrong.”

It’s as if a journalist covered a bank robbery, and reported that the gang turned up badly dressed and tripped off an alarm, but not that they got away with five million dollars.

This is a clue to just how manufactured the “consensus” is, and how fake the veneer of certainty is. One of the main modelers is admitting the climate models have got it wrong. But it’s only in a “momentary” sense, so it lacks punch and comes with a its own cover…”the data must be wrong”.

The real story here is missing. It’s as if a journalist covered a bank robbery, and reported that the gang turned up badly dressed and tripped off an alarm, but not that they got away with five million dollars. And the real test will come. The bank cameras clearly identify the law-breakers. Will anyone report it if the police don’t question the crooks?

UPDATE: The Australian put this story on Page 1, and added an image file of “quotes” for which they deserve kudos. That was not apparent from the website edition (and the print copy was not available when I wrote this blog post). Clearly The Australian realizes the import of this story and they should be commended. As well, the print edition contains some quotes in an image file which is also not available online. It’s a shame the online version is not a full copy.

The print image contains the quote from Trenberth about being unable to account for the lack of warming.… and it also contains a quote from Phil Jones about “using the Nature trick… to hide the decline“. While the article still doesn’t tackle the gravity of hiding and adjusting the data, or deleting records in the face of legal requests to see them, it isn’t completely missing the point as the online edition suggests.

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